Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  His appetite for rush and violence was even more evident in an arduous climb up Mount Vesuvius in 1845, the year before his Swiss sojourn. He had arranged to ascend the mountain at night, to enhance the fiery spectacle within the crater. Nearing the top, he admired the moonlit vista below: sea, Naples, and countryside.

  The whole prospect is in this lovely state when we come upon the platform on the mountain-top—the region of Fire—an exhausted crater formed of great masses of gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some tremendous waterfall, burnt up; from every chink and crevice of which, hot sulphurous smoke is pouring out: while, from another conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising abruptly from this platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth: reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the air like feathers, and fall down like lead. What words can paint the gloom and grandeur of this scene!

  He was eager to climb to the higher, active crater: “There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an irresistible desire to get nearer to it. We cannot rest long, without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees, accompanied by the head-guide, to climb to the brim of the flaming crater, and try to look in.” Prudently remaining below, the rest of the climbing party “yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and call to us to come back”:

  What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin crust of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if there be any); and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces, and the shower of red-hot ashes that is raining down, and the choking smoke and sulphur; we may well feel giddy and irrational like drunken men. But, we contrive to climb up to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into the Hell of boiling fire below.

  And yet this was the man whose dueling-frogs figurine had to be precisely in its assigned position before he could dip his pen in the inkwell.

  His love of order and fascination with violence often rub against each other in his fiction. Novel after novel presents scenes of tidy, cozy homes. In David Copperfield, the Peggotty family lives in a beached boat, snug and shipshape, “beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible.” Visiting this boat-house, young David Copperfield is shown to his bedroom, “the completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen—in the stern of the vessel; with a little window, where the rudder used to go through; a little looking-glass, just the right height for me, nailed against the wall, and framed with oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was just room enough to get into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its brightness.” Such snugness appealed deeply to Dickens, satisfying both his need for order and his wistfulness for childhood’s small world.

  Yet his novels betray, too, his attraction to chaos and violence. In his novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, he was both appalled and excited by the fury of the Paris mob:

  “… The Bastille!”

  With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began.

  The mob presses the attack: “Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon-loads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom, smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea.” The bloodthirsty Madame Defarge is the harpy-heroine of the assault, and when the governor of the Bastille is hauled out and murdered by a “rain of stabs and blows,” she pounces on his corpse: “When he dropped dead … she put her foot upon his neck, and with her cruel knife—long ready—hewed off his head.” Then “the sea rushed on”:

  The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

  Dickens the bourgeois Victorian householder was horrified by his own vivid imagining of such mayhem and butchery—and yet sympathetic, too. He could imagine himself one of the mob, but also one of its victims—one of the heads borne aloft on pikes, “whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended—not an abolished—expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, ‘THOU DIDST IT!’”

  Tidiness, punctuality, and domestic coziness … volcanoes, storms, rampaging mobs, and murder: such inconsistencies and conflicts fueled his genius.

  Other contradictions abound. He admired “the great progress of the country … of Railway construction, of Electric Telegraph discovery, of improvements in Machinery.” He demanded that his sons “be trained in the spirit of the Time,” and thought it would be “horrible” if his eldest son “were to get hold of any conservative or High church notions.” He regarded every era before his own as benighted if not barbaric, with the middle ages a particular horror. “Dickens was a pure modernist,” John Ruskin scoffed, “a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence—and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers.” And yet despite his progressive zeal, he was deeply nostalgic, strongly in the grip of his own past.

  He was gregarious and sociable, and an exuberant performer who loved to organize theatricals and act the leading roles, and to read aloud from his own works. Behind his gusto and bonhomie, he maintained a deep reserve, however. He kept his childhood employment in the blacking factory a close secret for a quarter of a century, even from his wife. He admitted to being “chary of shewing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young.” One of his sons, Henry, testified to his father’s “intense dislike of ‘letting himself go’ in private life or of using language which might be deemed strained or over-effusive,” and recalled an example. After his first year at Cambridge, Henry won a scholarship from his college. Driving a carriage to the train station near their home in Kent, Gad’s Hill, to meet his father, arriving on the train from London, Henry announced the triumph. Dickens’s congratulations were perfunctory:

  He said, “Capital! capital!”—nothing more. Disappointed to find that he received the news apparently so lightly, I took my seat beside him in the pony carriage he was driving. Nothing more happened until we had got halfway to Gad’s Hill, when he broke down completely. Turning towards me with tears in his eyes and giving me a warm grip of the hand, he said, “God bless you, my boy; God bless you!”

  Though reluctant to betray emotion to his son, Dickens wept openly at the theater and delighted in extracting tears from his own audiences when he read or acted.

  He could in fact be highly sentimental, and none of his novels is wholly free of lachrymose indulgences. One of his most notable triumphs in this way was the death of the heroine Little Nell in his fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Thousands of readers wept as Nell languished—as did Dickens himself. “I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it,” he wrote as Nell lay dying, and two weeks later (it took her many chapters to die), he lamented that “I am slowly murdering that poor child, and grow wretched over it. It wrings my heart.” As Nell’s end grew yet closer, he felt himself “the most wretched of the wretched”:

  It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place.… I shan’t recover it for a long time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. It is such a painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow.

  And finally having d
ispatched Little Nell, he sighed: “I am, for the time being, nearly dead with work—and grief for the loss of my child.”

  One reader deeply touched by Nell’s death was William Bradbury, a partner in the firm of Bradbury and Evans, Dickens’s publishers. A few years earlier, Bradbury had lost a young daughter, and as he narrated Nell’s slow dying, Dickens kept people like Bradbury in mind: “I resolved to try and do something which might be read by people about whom Death had been,—with a softened feeling, and with consolation.” He was gratified when Bradbury wrote an appreciative note: “I was moved to have poor Bradbury’s note yesterday, and was glad to think he felt as I would have had him.”

  But he “who wrote so tenderly, so sentimentally, so gushingly,” an acquaintance observed, “had a strain of hardness in his nature which was like a rod of iron in his soul.” In 1854, Dickens described with comic zest a boy’s death in a London street accident:

  You know my man Cooper? Steady stupid sort of highly respectable creature?… Eldest boy 13 years old, “working” (I can’t conceive how) at a Mathematical Instrument Maker’s … On Tuesday night, the boy did not come home. Mother half distracted, and getting up at 5 in the morning to go and look for him. Father went out after breakfast, to do likewise.… Father conferring with Policeman on disappearance, up comes strange boy saying that how he as eerd tell, as a boy is a lyin in the “Bonus” [bone-house, or mortuary], as was run over. Wretched father goes to the Bonus … and finds his child with his head smashed to pieces!… He fell under a coal waggon as it was advancing, and was picked up as Dead as Adam.

  Just the year before this joking account of a boy’s death, Dickens had invited his readers to weep at the pathetic death of another boy, Jo the crossing sweeper, a character in Bleak House.

  Some years later William Bradbury, who had been consoled for the death of his young daughter by Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop, lost another child—an adult son who took his life by drinking prussic acid. Having in the meantime quarreled with Bradbury, for reasons reflecting badly on himself, Dickens regarded his former friend’s new grief with cold vindictiveness, greeting young Bradbury’s suicide with gloating satisfaction. “Mr. Henry Bradbury has poisoned himself,” he gossiped. “A gloomy professional purchaser of Nos., with a dirty face, .… offered to make oath ‘wot he dun it in Cremorne in a bottle o’ Soda Water. It wos last Sunday, wot he knowed Mr. Bradbury well, and he dun it there.’” Another version had Bradbury’s death occurring at his father’s house, and Dickens continued:

  I cannot say which account is correct—probably neither—but the wretched creature is doubtless dead.… Nothing having appeared in the papers, I suppose strong influence to have been used in that wise, to keep the dismal story quiet. Holsworth … said that he, the deceased, “had been laying it at Miss Evans’s door for her getting married.” God knows whether any blurred vision of that most undesirable female with the brass-headed eyes, ever crossed his drunken mind.

  He could be not only cold but ruthless. When news of the 1857 Indian Mutiny reached England, he blustered that were he Commander in Chief in India, he would give notice of his intention “to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities.” Three years later, following the Second Opium War, he “spoke with great vehemence against the Chinese” and “believed that if we struck off the heads of 500 mandarins we should achieve more than by the greatest of victories.” When a few years later the English governor of Jamaica suppressed a native insurrection with much bloodshed, flogging six hundred and summarily executing more than three hundred, Dickens heartily approved.

  He was both pragmatic and idealistic. He was a highly successful entrepreneur and businessman. It was more or less an accident that his first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in monthly numbers, but it proved a happy accident, and he seized on the advantages of serial publication and exploited them for the rest of his career. He holds a leading place in a nineteenth-century revolution in publishing, a revolution “brought about by attendant revolutions in literacy, real wages, urbanization, industrialization, technology, commerce, finance, transportation, and law, to be sure,” as the leading scholar of Dickens’s dealings with his publishers, Robert L. Patten, describes it, “but at critical points fuelled and sparked by one writer, Charles Dickens.” His friend and fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton admitted that Dickens was “one of the greatest geniuses in fiction the world has produced,” but noted, with less admiration, that Dickens “understands the practical part of Authorship beyond any writer—[Walter] Scott not excepted.” In an interview a few weeks before his death, an aspiring young writer was impressed by his charm but also “found Mr. Dickens very practical. He spoke a great deal of the pecuniary advantages to be derived from his profession.” He was aggressive and astute in extracting profit from his writings. Knowing that he was more valuable to his publishers than they to him, Dickens discarded them whenever it suited him. By twenty-five, he had already disposed of two and moved on to a third. His dealings were sometimes barely scrupulous, and certainly not high-minded. In disputes with his publishers, Patten admits, “Dickens behaved outrageously at times.”

  He wrote for money, enjoyed money, and spent liberally. It is a common misconception that he wrote long novels because he was paid by the word, but he was bent on squeezing shillings and pounds from his writing and reputation. His fecund imagination was a gift, but writing novels was hard work. “I do not regard successful fiction writing as a thing to be achieved in ‘leisure moments,’” he once acidly observed to a genteel amateur. Because fiction-writing was a heavy drain on his energies and provided little income between novels, he established a weekly magazine, Household Words, with himself as proprietor, editor, and frequent contributor, to provide him with a steadier income. Falling out with Household Words’ publisher, he promptly discontinued it and began another weekly, All the Year Round.

  Eventually he realized that he could reap more profit from his fame and histrionic flair by giving public readings from his novels and stories, and for his last dozen years reading tours consumed more of his time, and earned more money, than writing. His letters are full of gleeful financial accountings from these readings, as: “I made last week, clear profit, £340; and have made, in the month of August, a profit of One Thousand Guineas!… Pretty well, I think?” He gave generously of time and energy to worthy causes, but his almsgiving was modest. In his will, he bequeathed one thousand pounds to his mistress; nothing to charity.

  But focusing on Dickens’s hard-edged dealings and business push misses his complexity. He was deeply and ardently idealistic. He entertained romantic notions of the poor and dispossessed—the penniless but cheerful and loving Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol, for example. He idealized childhood, and his novels often feature noble-hearted children, preferably orphans, struggling in a world of selfish, rapacious adults; Oliver Twist is only one of many such virtuous orphans.

  After his death, eulogies and reminiscences were almost uniformly laudatory, sometimes fulsome. His energetic benevolence was particularly remarked. His best American friend, the Boston publisher J. T. Fields, recalled that in Dickens’s presence “there was perpetual sunshine, and gloom was banished.… No man suffered more keenly or sympathized more fully than he did with want and misery; but his motto was, ‘Don’t stand and cry; press forward and help remove the difficulty.’”

  But a woman friendly with his mistreated wife was less dazzled by Dickens’s radiant virtues: “That man,” she declared, “is a brute.”

  These and other contradictions and conflicts flowed into Dickens’s novels: energizing, animating, complicating, enriching them. What did not find its way into them was love—or so it would seem. George Orwell, for example, claimed that “sexual love is almost entirely outside his scope.”

  In 1847, Dickens was in the midst of Dombey and Son, his sixth novel, published serially over the course of a year and a half. Dombey a
nd Son’s heroine, Florence, is a girl of impeccable purity and virtue who dedicates herself to her sickly young brother and cruel, autocratic father, and who over the course of the novel weeps eighty-eight times, one reader calculated. The novel lacks a hero and features only the most pallid of romances. Meanwhile, during Dombey’s month-by-month progress, Wuthering Heights was published. For heroine, Wuthering Heights features the recklessly eager Catherine Earnshaw; for hero, the savagely passionate Heathcliff. It seems an anomaly that the immaculate young heroine Florence Dombey should have been created by a thirty-five-year-old man, experienced and worldly, father of half a dozen children, while Wuthering Heights’s author “Ellis Bell” was a spinster living in a remote Yorkshire parsonage.

  Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s first and, as it turned out, only novel. Dickens’s own first novel, Pickwick Papers, published a decade earlier, the year Victoria ascended the throne, could scarcely have been more different. Wholly lacking romance, let alone erotic fury, Pickwick Papers chronicled the misadventures of a genial old man and his bumbling chums. It had been a great popular success, making Dickens’s reputation, and remained for most of his contemporaries as well as many later readers their favorite among his novels, even as he went on to write fourteen more.

  His second novel demonstrated that he was much more than just a comic genius, however. Begun as he was still in the midst of Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist was strikingly different: a lurid melodrama set among the criminal underworld of London, with orphan pathos and anti-establishment satire. But the hero of Oliver Twist is a young boy, who falls not into love but into drawing-room gentility. One of the novel’s two young female characters is, to be sure, a prostitute, compulsively bound to a brutal thug; but Oliver Twist’s heroine is an angel, eventually married in the most perfunctory of romances. Oliver Twist the character initiated Dickens’s fictional romance with the lonely child and orphan, the outcast and powerless. His novels consistently favored such characters, intermittently expanding the sentiment into a reformist agenda. The sparkling humorist of Pickwick Papers proved to be, as well, an earnest Victorian moralist.